Let's hear it for the boy

Well, we went to the see the stage production of Footloose with the Tuesday Club last night. When the musical opened on Broadway back in the late 90s, critics were less than kind, and I can see why. Still the cast had a lot of energy, the dance numbers were pretty good and some of the voices were excellent.

My favorite scene in the 1984 movie is when Ren (Kevin Bacon) is teaching the awkward Willard (Chris Penn) to dance to Let's Hear It for the Boy!. The guy who played Ren in this production didn't impress me -- seemed to shout his lines -- but the guy who was Willard was great and the scene where he learns to dance was very entertaining. He had the best musical number, too, Mama Says, ably backed up by the other guys as a campy chorus line. The woman who played Willard's love interest had a stand-out voice, and the chemistry between the characters was charming and much more fun and credible than that between Ren and Ariel

Michelangelo said he had been told not to go to dinner theater because it was usually a bad dinner and bad theater. We agreed, however, that the meal was quite good and that the evening -- hardly Shakespeare -- was entertaining.

We had been invited by Debbie Kinder to join the Tuesday Club group for the evening. We sat with Debbie, her mother -- I wound up sitting next to Mrs. Reese, as often happens when we are all out together, and I told her that if we kept meeting for dinner like this, people will begin to talk-- and Pat Anderson, another friend who lives just up the road a piece.

The Tuesday Club was founded in the days of yore (Debbie's great-grandmother was a charter member) as a sort of literary club for the ladies of Wisconsin Dells -- only back then it was still Kilbourn City. They meet once a month to listen to a presentation, have tea and cake and so on. Tom says it is one of those outfits where they only consider you for membership if your family has lived here since Adam and Eve stumbled out of the garden. Mrs. Reese has been a member for over fifty years, something of a record. One of my librarian friends is also a member, and lots of people looked familiar. On this occasion, the ladies had brought husbands and invited a few select outsiders.

I would guess the average age of the group was ... mature, and I was surprised at how loudly most of them applauded a very youth-oriented show. Debbie's mother candidly said she didn't care for it, but she liked the food a lot. The meal was served before the show, with dessert (quite good) coming at intermission. Mrs. Reese started asking the (Romanian?) waiter (whose English is still not strong) for dessert before he even had a chance to remove the dinner plates. He explained that it came later, and Debbie asked him to make sure her mother was served first. He very kindly did so, earning a nice gratuity from everyone at the table for his courtesy.

And that was our night at Broadway in the Dells.